Russia's Anti-West Isolationism

MOSCOW — Russia’s quasiwar in eastern Ukraine is in no small measure a product of long-felt anti-Western tensions within Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin that are rapidly spiraling out of control.

With the downing of the Malaysian airliner over territory controlled by pro-Russian insurgents, the rift between Russia and Ukraine has become an international conflict. Citizens of the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, Britain, Belgium and other countries have been killed in a war that many people in the West might have thought had little to do with them.

We do not know who pulled the trigger, but we know that the armed rebels operating in the east of Ukraine have always had the vocal support of high-ranking Kremlin officials. Since late February, when Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled Kiev, Russia’s official media has been bending over backward to present the new Ukrainian government as a fascist junta manipulated by the West while the Kremlin pursues its twin goals — keeping NATO and Western economic influence in check.

The virulent, anti-American, anti-Western rhetoric emanating from the Kremlin has been one of the main drivers of Moscow’s support for the Ukrainian conflict. This antipathy has its roots in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the dashed hopes and disillusion that fueled an unprincipled scramble for wealth and power in the anarchy that followed.

Over the ensuing decades, the leaders of the Russian establishment have grown increasingly suspicious and fiercely antagonistic toward Western economic and political institutions. Since 1993, high-ranking bureaucrats, academics, members of parliament, business executives, and top law enforcement and security officials have shown rising levels of anti-Americanism, according to a recent study by the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and William Zimmerman of the University of Michigan. The source of this antipathy, according to Eduard Ponarin, a professor of sociology at the school, “is elite frustration over the failure to modernize their country along some foreign models.”

Mutual trust between Russian and American elites did rise slightly in the early years of this century. President George W. Bush and Mr. Putin exhibited a warm rapport during their first meeting, in Slovenia in June of 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Kremlin voiced strong support for Washington’s war on terror. But the show of cordiality did not hold: Clashes erupted over the Iraqi war, NATO expansion, and the so-called color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

Anti-Americanism came from the top down. The Russian ruling class saw these events as hostile acts directed at Moscow by the West. President Putin, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and their supporters found it politically useful to accentuate anti-American rhetoric to garner public support, especially as the economic growth that heralded Mr. Putin’s early years in power sputtered and faded.

The elites who went through a profound disillusionment with the Western ways are now occupying key decision-making positions in the Kremlin, state-owned business and media. These people learned most of their survival skills in the 1990s. They know how to operate in a market that is barely regulated. They know how to keep their adversaries guessing. It’s an environment where the levels of trust are low, the levels of uncertainty are high and the rule of law does not mean much.

Cynical pragmatism is the order of the day. President Putin and his circle see gullibility and idealism of any kind as a politician’s main weakness. Mr. Putin’s skills — sharpened through the years of growing disillusionment in Russia — are uniquely suited to this environment. He is both very effective in playing upon this distrust of the West and highly adept in his politics of international disruption.

While efforts by Washington — such as President Obama’s push for tougher sanctions — are understandable, they feed into Putin’s hands, enabling him to play the patriotic card, gaining political traction at home as he inveighs against foreign powers hostile to Russia and scores points against his domestic critics — Westernized middle class urban dwellers who see his authoritarian demagoguery for what it is.

According to a 2013 report from the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian think tank, members of the generation born in the 1980s who are now beginning to enter elite positions in Russian academic, professional and political life are increasingly suspicious about the global ambitions of the United States. These are President Putin’s minions. So are the thousands of people from both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border who have taken up arms to fight the so-called fascists.

Even as they fed the flames of war, the Kremlin and the media it controls have been constantly shirking any responsibility for the fighting. Even now, Mr. Putin blames Ukraine for the downing of the Malaysian Airliner, declaring that Kiev is at fault for the region’s unrest. Yet, in recent days (even before the plane went down) his pragmatic side has kicked in. Striking a statesmanlike stance, Mr. Putin has called for an international investigation into the downing of the airliner.

Yet even if Russia has not directly supplied the insurgents with the missile technology that destroyed the plane, the sheer scale of the Russian propaganda machine effort against the West could not have continued without consequences. The Russian economy grows weaker as tougher sanctions take their toll, investors shun our markets and our brightest people flee the country. While our hearts go out to the families of the victims, this tragedy has another troubling side for Russians. Whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, Mr. Putin’s rhetoric has come full circle: Our country has become what he has always warned us was true — a place surrounded by enemies.

Maxim Trudolyubov is the opinion page editor of the business newspaper Vedomosti.